Free I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow by Jonathan Goldstein

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    â€œLucky for you my boy needs a hat,” she says. “Walk around in it. Make sure it isn’t too tight around the temples.”
    As we leave the store together, my new cap on my head, I feel about ten years old.
    â€œI’ll hold on to the receipt,” my mother says. “Just in case.”

A Thousand Monkeys and Darwin
    (32 weeks)
    MONDAY.
    I’m sick in bed. I wish I had some apple juice and Spider-Man comics, but for now I’d settle for Kleenex. I call up Howard to bring some over.
    â€œUse toilet paper,” he says.
    â€œThat’d be unseemly for a man of my social carriage,” I say.
    â€œHey, did I tell you about my idea for a new twist on toilet paper?” Howard asks, sounding as though he’s leaning into the receiver. “It’s toilet paper that has the face of someone you hate printed on each square.”
    Howard goes on to explain how his invention could mean the end of school bullying, gangland violence, and possibly, even war.
    â€œJust ball up your detractors and wipe,” he says. “Ibelieve I’ve always done my finest work behind the backs of my enemies. Now they can do their finest work behind mine.”
    We get off the phone and I get some toilet paper to blow my nose.With no enemies defaced, it almost feels like a waste of my effort.
    TUESDAY.
    My cold has not gotten better, so I lie in bed and watch Jerry Lewis’s The Ladies Man . In one scene, Lewis’s character, Herbert H. Heebert, is being force-fed baby food while strapped into a high chair. The scene has the look of something that’s been directed by a thousand monkeys seated behind a thousand movie cameras.While the movie proves not to be very good, it is, in parts, stunningly beautiful to watch—the sets, the colours—and there are moments of almost perfect absurdity.
    Beginning to feel guilty about not getting enough rest, I stop the film, but just before I do, Lewis, in an uncharacteristic moment of lucidity, says wistfully, “Being alone can be very lonely. At least with people around, you can be lonely with noise.”
    Wisdom can come from the most unexpected places, and no place is more unexpected than the spastic, baby food – encrusted mouth of Jerry Lewis.
    WEDNESDAY.
    Lonely, still sick, and without anything to make lunch with, I call up Tony to see if he’ll bring me over some food.
    â€œAll I’ve got is half a bag of Fritos and some pickles,” I say.
    â€œYou should forget about lunch and just snack,” he says. “Snacking is a very evolved human endeavour.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œI just saw a news report about how in three billion years, a day will be a month long. So with breakfast being two weeks away from dinner, and dinner being two weeks away from lunch, snacking between meals will be an evolutionary necessity.”
    â€œCan you bring me over some chicken soup?” I plead.
    â€œNo dice,” he says. “ Wheel of Fortune is about to come on and I’ve got a bowl of cereal on my lap.”
    I get off the phone and open the bag of Fritos. I only wish Darwin was alive to see this.

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
    (31 weeks)
    MONDAY.
    Fully recovered, I’ve started writing a story for my radio show. It’s about a man who spends the morning eating himself sick with pie only to remember—in a flash of sinus-clearing terror—that he’s due to participate in a county fair pie-eating contest in an hour. He’d drunkenly challenged his ex-wife’s new husband to an eat-off several weeks earlier, and now, ready to burst at the seams, he sets off to the fair to do his best.
    I want it to be a parable about remaining stoic in the face of nausea. While I know it will end with his being rushed to the ER to have his stomach pumped, I’m not sure what happens in the middle.
    I look over my notes. They are not helpful. One note reads “Make pie more